The case for GE’s holographic storage

We get letters, and some of them even disagree with us. A reader does a …

Reader Kyle Brady took issue with a recent post of mine on GE's holographic storage breakthrough. I thought his response made some good points, so I got permission from him to reproduce it in full:

Jon Stokes did a writeup of a new optical disc technology from GE that can produce 500GB storage on each disc... and they were sneering at it. I'm here to clear the air.

Essentially, the discs use a holographic imaging technology to accomplish multi-layer storage on a special material that I'm assuming is a variant of plastic. You can read the tech specs on it if you want. But here's a quote from Jon’s piece:

If anyone can make the case for a 500GB optical disc in 2011, I'd love to hear it.

Excuse me? I think that's a little overly critical. Perhaps there's not a market for gigantic data storage for the average person... or maybe there is?

Consider that the average music collection today is in the Gigabyte range, and can easily reach double-digits. Personally, I'm sitting on about 65GB of music - not all of that fits on my iPod, and it sure isn't very portable to other devices since the iPod doesn't facilitate easy data transfers.

Ever tried burning some music for a friend on CDs these days? I've resorted to using DVDs because of the larger storage capacity. Who's to say that a 500GB disc wouldn't be useful? You could burn your entire music collection to disc while you're sleeping, pop it in the car on the drive to work, listen from your work computer, etc. All from one disc.

But this is just the immediate and most obvious use. Imagine the implications.

CD technology paved the way of using a combination of lasers and plastic for data storage, quickly followed by DVDs and now Blu-Ray DVDs, each successor having larger storage and a greater feature set. But non-portable storage hasn't changed that drastically in almost two decades... excluding a small minority of solid-state drives (in things like new iPods, netbooks, etc.), we're still using magnetized plates read by a mini robotic arm.

Solid-state drives have their own glories and limitations, which I won't get into. But GE has made a successful application of holographic technology for data storage. Isn't this important? Yes, of course!

Many people compare the magnetized plates on hard-drives to CDs, but the big difference is the method of read/write via a “head” instead of a laser. What if the laser was made small enough or the discs spread far enough apart? You could essentially swap out magnetized plates for holographic discs, ignoring what would be a major difference in operational instruction sets, creating a hard-drive replacement with storage sizes an order of magnitude larger.

The access speed for such a setup is unclear, but today’s hard-drives are slow … relatively speaking. By turning things over to a digital counterpart, it should, by default, be faster. Entire racks of network-attached storage in data centers could be replaced by a handful of devices that would take a fraction of the space and the need for consumer-level external hard-drives would disappear.

We're not going to reach ubiquitous and unobtrusive data storage via solid-state drives, unless something drastically changes - the memristor has potential. But it's definitely not happening with standard hard-disk technology. Once the holographic method is shown to be successful, others are going to look at how to apply the same ideas to their hardware projects, and experiment with improving it, resulting in all the usual suspects: greater storage density, higher speeds, greater precision, and, most importantly, a decrease in physical scale.

Is Kyle correct in thinking that holographic storage is on track to replace magnetic storage eventually, both in the datacenter and on the desktop? It sounds plausible to me, but I think the timeframe is the biggest open question. What do you think?

33 Reader Comments

I think that Mr Stokes takedown is a little premature and the reader response a little to optimistic.

It really comes down to assesment of usage and critically three different areas:

1) Home use is going the way of solid state as the most flexible and convienient way of storage. The iPhone phenomenon.2) Professional use to archive and store mass amounts of stat is still growing and needs to fill the gap where Blu-ray is not able to go. Think large medical scans, Data archiving from Sarbanes-Oxley scenarios.3) The unpredicatable use by someone re-using the technology in an innovative and creative way that was un-thought of. A new product niche etc.

So really there is a middle ground to both arguments and a little less glamourous but still the fact remains that GE will be bringing 7 years of research to the mass-market that once may have gone the route of a white elephant.

From a personal data management standpoint, I have always been most satisfied with a sharpie note directly on an optical disk placed on a shelf or in a file. When I walk up to the shelf, put the disk in my hand, I can read the note and know that the data is "my documents backup, dec. 2005", or "photos, hawaii, 2007". As I have amassed portable hard drives I find it much less easy to look at the device and know what is on it. I know there are a lot of different backup options and the size of my data requires a portable drive, but I would prefer a disk I could burn once and put on the shelf and forget about.

The success of this backup system is entirely dependent on extremely inexpensive media and burners. For me, Bluray is still theoretical as a data backup disk and will remain that way until disks are less than a buck and burners are less than 100 bucks.

A stackable array inside a hd form factor seems novel to me. If they can bypass the rotating media it might be even better from an access time perspective- e.g. use micro mirror positioning to steer the beam.

I am concerned about how long such a disk will be able to securely store data. Some CD's I burnt 10 years ago are not readable anymore, while a few from 5/6 years ago are also not usable anymore. And so far, I have not been disappointed by magnetic device for long term storage. My guess is that such a storage medium will have a future only if it can guarantee a long term solution to store important data.

I agree with vibedog, price is the important thing. Zip disk's back in their day were pretty cool, but at 10$ a pop the technology died out. Jaz (Jazz?) disks were really cool, but at 100$ a pop most people never even saw one in person outside a computer store. Yea there were other clicking reasons why they died out, but price was a huge factor in it.

Sure it would be neat to burn 65GB of music to a disk and play it in my car/work/etc, but if the disk costs 50$ and I need a brand new bleeding edge disk player for the car and won't have a PC that can play it at work for 10+ years because I don't work at GE in the holographic storage department... who cares? Burn it to a disk so I can listen to it in my one PC with a super expensive holigraphic drive I burned it on? Just look at the prices of CD/DVD readers/burners when they first came out, there isn't any reason to believe this would be any different.

It's also significantly less cool if the disk stops working about a week after I put it in my car, where it sits in the 100 degree florida heat before factoring in the oven factor of the car itself. I've left CDR's upside down half covered on the passenger seat before (i.e. sheet of paper/book/cell charger cord/whatever partially on top), taken them out later, and seen the pattern/shadow burned into the nonfunctional disk. Even pressed CD's don't like sitting in my car for months on end.

Give me 250GB or so for about a $1/disk or less and I could use it for short term "just backup everything" type stuff like uncompressed fraps footage from games or whatever. Sure 500GB a disk would be cool, but not if it's so expensive I have to say "do I really want to use that disk?". Really it comes down to price, CDR's and DVDR's work well because they are so cheap you care more about the time you spent making a bad burn than you do about the used up disk. You don't care if your friend wants you to burn him a bunch of crap to a CD/DVD because it's cheap. When I had a zip drive, I never gave someone a zipdisk without getting one in exchange or expecting it back.

I'm sitting on about 1.25TB of disk space in my home PC. I have well over 500GB of installed games alone! I have no way to easily back that much drive space up. A 500GB disc is a perfect solution for my backup needs. And that is on top of having a way to archive literally hundreds of software CDs and DVDs as ISO images and store them on very few 500GB discs in case I lose or render unreadable the original discs.

I think there is a huge consumer market for this level of removeable storage, if the drives and discs can be produced cheaply enough.

I personally don't like the idea of spinning media. It's loud and wastes power. I think the future of holo-storage will be closer to TNG's isolinear chips - small, somewhat fragile, and totally stationary.

I took Jon's original discussion to be focused mostly on the storage volume in question, and I disagree with his conclusion. As long as media and hardware costs allow, we'll use all the storage made available. Whether for backup, live access, or distribution, the more available storage, the more uses and information types and density we'll invent. 4K cinematic data densities alone will find a use for 500GB media, if it's affordable. Nature will always find a use for as much information as is available, it's the law! Go GE!

The base issue may not be the data media but the machine that reads it. Case in point: The reams of data at JPL amassed during the Apollo era that can't be read because there are no longer any machines that can read it. Or, try and find an 8-track player. - mitch

Biggest use I see for something like this is backups for home users if the media is cheap enough. Even still, the issue with dead optical media as mentioned earlier is a potential problem. I've had the same issue for a lot of my burned media. Can't see this crossing over to replace magnetic because of that issue and as drive sizes continue to ramp up I'm not sure the 500 gig amount is really that useful. Additionally, cloud backup is also going to cut into the usefulness for backups.

As far as using it for portable media, I just don't see it. PMPs already seem to be working on replacing optical in vehicles for music. Why go back to optical when most of us are going to carry a PMP anyway? Add in the possible degradation issues mentioned a few posts ago and it makes even less sense.

Originally posted by HyLite:The base issue may not be the data media but the machine that reads it. Case in point: The reams of data at JPL amassed during the Apollo era that can't be read because there are no longer any machines that can read it. Try and find an 8-track player. - mitch

I agree with the determinations of original author, insofar as he is saying there is a market for these disks, but differ wildly on the application. I do not think any form of disk will replace large magnetic disks in the near future. Primarily, for the lang-term archival of data, HDD cannot be replaced. They are subject to magnetic exposure, certainly, but that is still far more reliable that other forms of media like discs and solid state. So, for your consumer looking for long-term storage, I doubt a laser-based storage will replace magnetic anytime soon.

For companies not worried so much about long-term storage of data (I.E., those who are based on constantly-changing information for whom archival is less important), I think you will see a shift from HDD to solid-state drives backed up by another form of media. Several manufacturers are working on server architecture based around solid-state. You will still need some other form of backup to support the solid-state, so the 500GB disc might be usefull...but again, most most corporations there is a major desire for long-term reliability.

So the demand, if there is one, will likely come from the consumer market. Certainly, there is a market for discs that big, provided the price is right. For example, I'm in the Marines and when I deploy, I take a LOT of movies. Most of them on a series of hard drives. If I could take a CD wallet with 10 500GB discs rather than a series of hard drives with the need for power supplies, proper USB or firewire connections, etc...yeah, I'd do it...provided I'm not spending hundreds per disc.

and while Blu-Ray has a domination on the market right now, we all know that eventually, there will be a demand for even higher resolution with ever-increasing amounts of data storage needed. So, if they focus on making the player now and bring down the price, by the time of the next big "thing" in resolution, they could be in position to offer cheap players and up to 500GB of storage for movies.

The gaming industry could also be a potential customer. Microsoft could certainly use a large disc-based storage medium for their next iteration of the XBox. While few games fill a Blu-Ray now, each generation of games jumps the size requirements and by the end of the cycle, there is inevitably a game which pushes the limit of any storage medium, and disc-changins is a major annoyance to consumers. With 500GBs on a single disc, you could be ahead of the curve on the next generation.

Whether or not this is feasible at all depends a lot on cost. I don't think I would routinely buy discs or replace my HDD instantly with a holographic disc, but I can certainly think of applications for it in my life. A lot depends on the future of consumable media- as we see with the PSP, many people think that digital distribution is the future of all media. I download games for my PS3 and XBox, I download music on my computer and I stream movies via netflix to both my xbox and my laptop.

How much longer will entertainment media (movies, music, games)be delivered in physical form? In 5 years will people care if they have the case for a movie, or would they rather just own the "rights" to have the movie streamed to them? I know personally, I like the convenience of streaming, but still routinely buy new movies. With games, digital download works mostly with smaller, simpler games. I would not want to wait for days to download the next big game...and what happens if (like a couple of months ago) I'm overseas with a connection that feels slower than 56k...4 weeks for the next Call of Duty installment? No thanks.

I would say that 500GB storage has a potential future, but that as the entertainment industries go, so goes the fate of the storage media. If we begin to move away from discs and focus on solid-state and streaming media, then discs could be passe in the next 5 years. Personally, I'd like to see the 500GB discs as the next generation (I would like to see what kind of games people would make to fill up 500GB of space). I just simply don't see major corporations switching from HDDs for long-term archival though. Discs are simply too short-lived and fragile to be used.

I agree with the rebuttal. Both the need for storage space and the eventual replacement of magnetic hard drives. I don't know the time frame but isn't it almost always shorter than we expect before something becomes mainstream? Optics have the possibility of MUCH faster steering than a magnetic read/write head. For those thinking about a moving head, like today's hard drive, consider something that works more like a beam steering mirror. It could be a "galvo" head laser or it could be a SLM array (might not even spin the disc!).

The competing technology I see are physical nano-arrays, flipping atomic-length switches. Pretty hard to beat that information density if we can overcome significant issues. So maybe optical holographic storage is the intermediate step.

The good news about weak archival properties, if they are no better than today's CD's, is most of what we need THAT much storage for doesn't mind a few lost bits over time. Single byte errors will not be that harmful in most photos, videos, or music. Even text remains intelligible with many errors.

"One company already "thinking in centuries" is Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. The entertainment giant is currently working toward a concept of archiving its films digitally, a project that would require a capacity approaching 3 exabytes (EB).

"We're pushing very hard with companies that make optical media to figure out what technologies might last at least 50 years and targeting up to 100 years," Aylsworth said. At the very least, "our goal is not to have to replace technology more often than every 25 years."

Right now the best hope, Warner Bros. officials said, is in a form of optical storage known as holographic disk storage, also known as holographic versatile disk (HVD). This uses a multilayered substrate read by two separate lasers, meaning it can pack more bits onto the media. Current optical media has a density of one bit per laser "pulse." Manufacturers of holographic disks are hoping to eventually achieve 600,000 bits per pulse."

Holographic discs are unlikely to replace hard drives, for a couple reasons.

The first reason is speed. The write and seek times for optical media have traditionally been the Achilles heel of the format, and I don't see anything with the new technology that will change that. Sequential read speeds for optical media are pretty good these days, but the poor seek times mean random access reads are much slower. If a holographic storage system can read multiple bits at a time, then it might be able to make up for these deficiencies, at least to an extent.

The second reason is storage density. 500 GB on a disc sounds like a lot, but once you convert that to bits-per-inch, you discover that the areal density isn't all that impressive. Western Digital's new 2 TB hard drives boast a manufacturer-claimed areal density of 400 gigabits per square inch. Assuming the holographic disc (standard CD size) is 120mm in diameter with a 45 mm hub, and accounting for unit conversions, it would have an areal density of only 265 gigabits per square inch.

I do not know if the data capacities are raw (pre-error correction) or effective (post-error correction), so those numbers could swing closer together. Or they could move further apart.

Given the numbers, though, I do not see hard drives in imminent danger of being replaced as primary storage. Like optical formats of the past, I see holographic storage used for archival and highly portable storage, assuming the discs are robust enough.

What's the sustained read/write speed, average random seek time, and longevity? If holographic can beat magnetic storage on those fronts, then it will start selling, economies of scale will kick in, and it will permeate the various markets.

If the numbers are closer to what we have for CD-RW and DVD+/-RW (esp. longevity - the former are often rated for only 1000 rewrites), then I don't see it happening.

If a company really wants to sell me on a storage tech at this point, they should ideally have blazing fast random seeks and an almost indestructible medium. Storage alone just kinda makes me yawn when 2TB mecahnical drives are approaching $100

Originally posted by bicarb:I agree with vibedog, price is the important thing. Zip disk's back in their day were pretty cool, but at 10$ a pop the technology died out. Jaz (Jazz?) disks were really cool, but at 100$ a pop most people never even saw one in person outside a computer store. Yea there were other clicking reasons why they died out, but price was a huge factor in it.

Sure it would be neat to burn 65GB of music to a disk and play it in my car/work/etc, but if the disk costs 50$ and I need a brand new bleeding edge disk player for the car and won't have a PC that can play it at work for 10+ years because I don't work at GE in the holographic storage department... who cares? Burn it to a disk so I can listen to it in my one PC with a super expensive holigraphic drive I burned it on? Just look at the prices of CD/DVD readers/burners when they first came out, there isn't any reason to believe this would be any different.

It's also significantly less cool if the disk stops working about a week after I put it in my car, where it sits in the 100 degree florida heat before factoring in the oven factor of the car itself. I've left CDR's upside down half covered on the passenger seat before (i.e. sheet of paper/book/cell charger cord/whatever partially on top), taken them out later, and seen the pattern/shadow burned into the nonfunctional disk. Even pressed CD's don't like sitting in my car for months on end.

Give me 250GB or so for about a $1/disk or less and I could use it for short term "just backup everything" type stuff like uncompressed fraps footage from games or whatever. Sure 500GB a disk would be cool, but not if it's so expensive I have to say "do I really want to use that disk?". Really it comes down to price, CDR's and DVDR's work well because they are so cheap you care more about the time you spent making a bad burn than you do about the used up disk. You don't care if your friend wants you to burn him a bunch of crap to a CD/DVD because it's cheap. When I had a zip drive, I never gave someone a zipdisk without getting one in exchange or expecting it back.

Indeed, the CD/DVD is the floppy of the 20xx. you can grab a 10-pack with covers, 25-100 spindles, and if one goes bad, just toss it and grab another.

Also, i really like how the medium and the reader is separate. How many external hardrives fails not because the plates go bad, but because the control electronics or the arms lock up?

If so happens with a optical drive, pry it open, extract the disc and get a new drive. Not so simple with a external harddrive.

However, the solid state devices seems to be quite rugged, but the price is nuts. For the price of a single 8GB pen drive, one can get a box of dual layer DVD, each with storage bordering on said pen drive.

I would really love to see pne drives sold in boxes of 10 or more, as then handing one of to someone, like one could do with a floppy and can do with a cd or dvd, would be no big issue.

Is Kyle correct in thinking that holographic storage is on track to replace magnetic storage eventually, both in the datacenter and on the desktop? It sounds plausible to me, but I think the timeframe is the biggest open question. What do you think?

No, holographic storage is write only media(at least the implementations I am aware of they just write updates to unused sectors); it will not replace HDD as the main storage on PCs, flash is the likely do so before Holographic Disks become affordable in the consumer space. It's place fits much better in the archiving of data. It has many advantages over tape currently being used and over time is almost certain to be cheaper and take less space than HDDs. However no technology seems to die in the server space so both tape and HDDs will certainly be in production for some time no matter what happens with laptops or PCs.

I have to agree with the original article. I assume that holographic media can potentially have higher read speeds than magnetic media (due to the layering of data), but unless it somehow avoids the writing problems of MLC storage, (having to read everything first) won't it have slower writes? Does it even allow random writes? I can't see an even slower solution replacing magnetic hard drives.

When it comes to price I'm sceptical. In the past, the ubiquitous nature of the drive mechanism, and the media allowed for economies of scale. Music came on CDs, Movies on DVDs. That meant cheap disks, cheap drives and eventually convenient rewritable media. I see online as the future of content delivery.

Size is still an issue, but convenience is king. You'll soon be able to get 2TB magnetic storage, add an enclosure and it's portable, relible, bigger and compatible with nearly every computer built in the last 8 years. For anyone who has 50+ gig of music a portable 2.5" HD is the way to go.

Holographic media will never take off unless it's cheaper, or bigger, or more convenient, or faster than hard disks, or some combination of the above. All of the so called solutions that holographic media enables are solvable today without the hassle of single use optical media.

I have to agree with the original article. I assume that holographic media can potentially have higher read speeds than magnetic media (due to the layering of data), but unless it somehow avoids the writing problems of MLC storage, (having to read everything first) won't it have slower writes? Does it even allow random writes? I can't see an even slower solution replacing magnetic hard drives.

Your confusing two technologies MLC is flash not optical storage, the bits in optical disks are stored in a solid mass of material at various points depending on the implementation of the system. It can have random writes, however it is likely that they will generally start from the middle and work its way out, appending new data after old data. Holographic disks as far as current techniques are impractical to replace the hard drive; replacing it totally would require alterations to the OS to even function properly. Since they a write once media, with any change you lower the total capacity of the drive because that means you are ignoring a section that has become useless and written the new state to an unused portion. Current HDDs can overwrite the same sector millions of times so a 500 GB HDD effectively will have many times the capacity over the life of the system vs a 500 GB optical drive.

Another consideration is none of the current versions of optical disks are an enclosed cases, they are designed to be ejected which means that they are being aimed at different segments of the market. HDDs are aimed at being persistently data available, optical disks are aimed at archiving and distribution of data/information/content which is not always going to be in the drive.

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Is Kyle correct in thinking that holographic storage is on track to replace magnetic storage eventually, both in the datacenter and on the desktop? It sounds plausible to me, but I think the timeframe is the biggest open question. What do you think?

The only 'magnetic' storage I see this capable replacing in the near future is tape drives, even then it will have to prove it's capacity to retain it's data over time and be competitive on price to storage capacity.

the reasoning for this 20:1 ratio is more time than physical space. a stack of 30 or even 40 floppies, is not a big deal. it starts to become a hassle after 5 boxes. same for CD/DVD/BD. problem here is _TIME_. how long does it take to do the backup ? if a PC-XT can format and save the data to a floppy in 3 minutes, it'll take one hour to backup. if it takes 5 minutes to burn a backup to DVD, we're talking almost 2 hours to burn 20 of them.

now, with even a 4 layer, 100 GB bluray that i can burn in about 5 min. each, we're back in the game. with a holografic 500 GB disks, we're good until hard disks reach the 10 TB range. which should happen in 4 years, give or take, so this holographic stuff is right on time.

Assuming comparable read/write performance to latest generation SSD's you still need to have 100x better durability than current rewritable optical media.

Here's the real problem for optical media and its very simple: size. Assuming that the optical disk will need to spin like a conventional hard drive you automatically exempt it from anything smaller than a netbook that needs storage space.

I have a 3g ipod nano with 8 gigs of ss storage. It's neat and handy and as I sit here looking at it I really wonder how it could possibly be workable using something that requires a slab of plastic the same thickness as a DVD, and a laser.

SSS (solid state storage, I'm being general here) is an awesome technology because it can be built into weird shapes without suffering performance drops.

Unless there is a huge breakthrough in shrinkage and read capability the giant whirring disk will have little use anywhere EXCEPT a data center and the trend of smaller 'good enough computing' devices seems pretty well defined.

I just don't see how any optical media hopes to compete without some ability to be packed into handheld devices and embedded systems.

The main problem with those that appear to be saying "holographic storage will never replace ..." is that they embody holographic storage (the general potential) in the "spinning disk" persona of the present GE (potential) implementation.

From a fundamental standpoint all optical storage technologies have a superior read access time: Limited only by the speed of light within the medium. So the fundamental limitation for a practical storage medium of a cubic centimeter, or so, is a fraction of a picosecond. Electronic and magnetic storage is fundamentally slower, in general, for a similar size.

Storage densities of photorefractive materials (what's used for these holographic storage technologies, long predating the present GE work) has a fundamental storage limit given by the density of donor/receptor centers in the material (often given by impurities within the material, but this need not, fundamentally, be the case). However, the practical limitation is typically closer to the wavelength of light used to read/write the data. Multiply that by the fact that the storage is fundamentally three dimensional, as opposed to the fundamentally 2D character of foreseeable electronics/magnetics, and you may hopefully see the potential.

Write times for photorefractive materials are limited by the electron diffusion rate, in the conduction band, from illuminated portions to dark portions of the material. This is on a similar order as electronic devices that are on the order of a wavelength of light (the wavelength of the writing laser). I recall having heard that the fundamental write times were on the order of picoseconds for the photorefractive materials available a couple of decades ago. Of course, foreseeable electronic storage devices, while smaller at the single transistor level (at least compared to visible light) still have to cope with having to go through multiple such devices in order to accomplish the write operation.

Also, all photorefractive materials I'm aware of (at least of those I, personally, would consider for use in anything other than WORM applications like CD-Rs) are random access materials. In fact, some of them have to be "refreshed" after multiple reads, since the reading operation partially degrades the photorefractive effect (electrons get freed up to drift back to where they came from). Of course, since light is what does the writing, unless one uses a WORM like system, one will have the "volatility" issues of such material left exposed to light in the right energy range (so this "problem" will disappear as the light used moves to the higher energy bands, like far ultraviolet).

Now, that's all at the "fundamental" level. What's important, of course, is the "practical" level. This is where GE's "spinning disk" comes in, or where other techniques for redirecting/shaping/etc. light come in. This is where we are far from the fundamental potential for such materials.

A couple of decades ago (is it that long?) there was already a plan to market a holographic storage system, on the order of terabytes, using a single photorefractive crystal. The problem was that it had millisecond access times due to the mechanical mirrors and such necessary to read/write the system (this caused the size of the system to bloom from the sugar cube sized crystal to a pizza box full of lasers and mechanical optical components, costing about $100K). The present "spinning disk" helps convert the laser redirection issues into a known problem with known solutions—much like any other optical disk system.

Is this the optimal solution? Is this what holographic storage will forever be like? I would most certainly suggest the negative response. No, the issues are how can we move to more fully utilize the fundamental strengths of such technology. Yes, the answer will almost certainly be of a solid-state storage type, no moving parts other than photons and electrons, but not one born of the already limited electronics (though it will, at least for the foreseeable future, almost certainly need to interface with such).

Fundamentally, if we can get away from the mechanical redirecting/shaping/etc. optical techniques, we are talking a potential for non-volatile random access storage with picosecond access times and capacities of well beyond terabytes per cubic centimeter: Think hard-disk capacity non-volatile RAM!

The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) uses a 3D Reading/writing technology called collinear holography. A duel laser system is needed to read/write information. A red laser and a green laser each read a different layer simultaneously. Drawbacks are extremely long read & write times. Also, the discs need to contain gold, which make them very, very expensive. I'd say this technology is no less than 10 years off. You might see a consumer model sometime after 2020. I'm usually pretty good with those estimates.

I'm sorry, but the reply to the original article just seems... it's hard to believe it was republished. Being optimistic is nice, but this takes optimism far past what is warranted, and has some severe logical or even factual errors.

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The access speed for such a setup is unclear, but today’s hard-drives are slow … relatively speaking. By turning things over to a digital counterpart, it should, by default, be faster.

I've read this a few times over and am STILL not entirely sure what was trying to be said. Hard drives are suddenly not digital? Hard drives are... slow? By relative comparison to... what? SSD? Yes... and optical is even slower.

Someone earlier in this thread pointed out that storage densities for current generation hard drives are already far higher than this new optical technology would bring, much less current generation optical devices. And when comparing evolutionary technologies, it is usually best to stick to current generation comparisons unless the growth over time of a new emerging technology is widely different from the growth over time of the technology it is being compared to.

The easiest way would be to start at when DVDs were released and look at hard drive sizes. So, let's say 1998, 4.7GB on a DVD, versus... about 20 GB on a hard drive? We could be optimistic and say 30, I don't easily recall, but a very light search makes 20 sound reasonable. Current generation hard drives are at about 2 TB. So we've already seen about 100 times growth in hard drives. This next generation optical storage would merely be a little over 100 times DVD size. I'm conveniently skipping over Blu-Ray and HDVD.

So, I know it's fun to geek out over "holographic" storage. But, please, let's stay grounded on planet earth when we're discussing actual technologies in development. If we want to start making random conjecture, I could as easily point to the flash memory market and say that it's likely to achieve similar storage amounts by the time this comes to market, possibly for cheaper, if we were to plot a graph of the increasing size versus decreasing price of flash USB sticks and similar products. And in a more convenient format.

While I hesitate to discard any idea of this being a worthwhile technology by the time it could arrive at market as the original article did, at the same time I find the optimism of this reply to be completely unfounded, and furthermore factually inaccurate. It makes a number of suppositions that seem to have no basis in reality.

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Now, that's all at the "fundamental" level. What's important, of course, is the "practical" level. This is where GE's "spinning disk" comes in, or where other techniques for redirecting/shaping/etc. light come in. This is where we are far from the fundamental potential for such materials.

That's very nice. Now if only someone could point me to where a product was being worked on using some form of redirecting/etc versus a spinning disk? This is where, imo, the original article is entirely correct... it doesn't waste time on conjecture of "what might happen if someone made a breakthrough with nano scale mirror arrays and driving them" but rather focuses on the technology as it is currently being developed and presented.

Which indeed would fall far short of both magnetic and other non optical storage. Whether it would still have good, marketable uses is another question, but it's hardly a hard drive killer, much less an SSD killer.

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Ever tried burning some music for a friend on CDs these days? I've resorted to using DVDs because of the larger storage capacity. Who's to say that a 500GB disc wouldn't be useful? You could burn your entire music collection to disc while you're sleeping, pop it in the car on the drive to work, listen from your work computer, etc. All from one disc.

CDs and DVDs imo shine at their uses for dealing with multiple discs treated in a relatively throw-away manner (giving data to someone else is a good example where they excel). At the same time, I find them lacking compared to USB flash sticks or portable hard drives for personal data portability. The form factor is unwieldy, and while portable hard drives do have shock issues, discs have scratch issues. In addition, they generally become essentially read only when taken into an unfamiliar environment. While every computer has an optical drive these days, every computer also has a USB port... and not every computer has an optical drive capable of write back. And stop to consider: how long was dvd around before dvd-rom drives became ubiquitous? Especially in many office environments that just order middle of the run business systems from someplace like Dell with little to no upgrades, when for some time a dvd drive was definitely an upgrade in those systems to the default optical device.

Again, this isn't to say optical discs are without uses. But trying to talk them up into some sort of killer format is simply... silly. Nothing that has been presented on the latest iteration of the technology deserves that degree of unfounded optimism.

Originally posted by Wikipedia:In December 2008, Pioneer Corporation unveiled a 400 GB Blu-ray Disc, which contains 16 data layers, 25 GB each, and will be compatible with current players after a firmware update. A planned launch is in the 2009-2010 time frame for ROM and 2010-2013 for rewritable discs. Ongoing development is under way to create a 1 TB Blu-ray Disc as soon as 2013.

It appears that you neglected to note the paragraph following the one you quote from my post:

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Originally posted by kaitliac:...

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Now, that's all at the "fundamental" level. What's important, of course, is the "practical" level. This is where GE's "spinning disk" comes in, or where other techniques for redirecting/shaping/etc. light come in. This is where we are far from the fundamental potential for such materials.

That's very nice. Now if only someone could point me to where a product was being worked on using some form of redirecting/etc versus a spinning disk?...

The relevant quote is:

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Originally posted by Halliday:...A couple of decades ago (is it that long?) there was already a plan to market a holographic storage system, on the order of terabytes, using a single photorefractive crystal. The problem was that it had millisecond access times due to the mechanical mirrors and such necessary to read/write the system (this caused the size of the system to bloom from the sugar cube sized crystal to a pizza box full of lasers and mechanical optical components, costing about $100K). ...

So, yes, I already pointed out at least one case "where a product was being worked on using some form of redirecting/etc versus a spinning disk". Was it practical? Is the present GE "spinning disk" approach more practical? What of the future?